This new trivia app lets you win money for free

There’s a buzz growing in offices across the country each afternoon — and it has nothing to do with work.

The buzz surrounds HQ Trivia, a new app from the co-creators of Vine, which has grown since its Aug. 26 debut from a couple of hundred players per game to more than 90,000 on Nov. 12.

Along with the increased participation, the prize money also has grown from around $100 per game to $7,500.

So far, no one has gotten rich, with the top HQ player taking home a total of $560.

Although theoretically one person could win the single-game grand prize, most proceeds are shared with many winners. If nobody wins, the prize rolls over into the next game’s pot.

But HQ Trivia, a free app, does amount to being a game that gives real money for nothing — other than answering 12 trivia questions correctly.

The money awarded is currently bankrolled by the several million dollars raised in a funding round from Lightspeed Venture Partners — an amount HQ Trivia co-founder Rus Yusupov would not reveal.

The ultimate plan is for HQ Trivia to eventually bring aboard sponsors. Now, though, the app is in its brand-building phase.

Eventually, Yusupov and business partner Colin Kroll, who together founded the now-defunct Vine app, said the goal is to offer a $1 million prize.

“We’ve created a new category here,” Yusupov said. “For us, it’s about making the best possible game. These live synchronous experiences — we want to make the game as big as we can.”

The twice-daily live trivia game — at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. daily and 9 p.m. on weekends — is a mash-up of the multiple-choice Q&A of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and the multi-player competitiveness of “Jeopardy.”

The questions, dished out by hosts, either comedian Scott Rogowsky or British TV personality Sharon Carpenter, range from embarrassingly easy to completely bedeviling.

“It’s all the winning elements of the TV world,” Yusupov told The Post in an interview last week. “We have an energetic, funny host. There’s music, there’s jokes. The questions are really interesting. It’s scheduled programming at the same time every day.”

Yusupov and Kroll scheduled the games to take maximum advantage of office workers at lunch or immediately after work.
The game consists of 12 multiple-choice questions, each of which must be answered within 10 seconds — long enough to ponder but fast enough to keep things moving and keep folks from Googling the answer.

If you get a question wrong, you’re eliminated and can try your luck next time.

A counter in the upper-left corner of your iPhone screen — HQ Trivia is not yet available on Android — keeps track of the number of players still in the game.

Yusupov said his team of writers aims to craft questions that don’t lend themselves to cheating.

“We try to write the questions in a way that’s not easy to Google,” he said. “If you can find the answer on Google, it’s just not fun.”